pale
by thir13enth
Summary: Zeref knew his thirteenth date with Mavis had gone well when she decided to invite herself into his room. He just…didn't expect everything that happened after that. Zervis.


**Quick Zervis AU while drinking the first cup of coffee for the morning. Done for a tumblr prompt.**

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Zeref knew his thirteenth date with Mavis had gone well when she decided to invite herself into his room.

His heart giggled when seeing the beautiful blonde's smile and he tried his best to keep his excitement inside of him as he let her into his dorm room, blushing bashfully when she asked him if she could come in to hang out a while for the rest of the night—whatever that meant.

And no—he was not just thirsty and wanted to get in bed with her. The punk rock romantic actually had planned to tell the angelic girl that he wanted to take the next step of commitment. In fact, ever since the beginning of that day, he had been rehearsing the exact way that he wanted to tell her that he wanted to be _her_ boyfriend and that he wanted her to be _his_ girlfriend.

So when she walked into his room—and saw on his walls all the posters of the hard metal bands that he had told her that he liked on previous dates and the red and black-based décor of the majority of the items sprawled over his bed and desk—and gave him a big smile, he couldn't help but gush at the feeling of her accepting his industrial metal head ways.

Everything was going the way he wanted it to, and all he had to do was take her fair hands in his and confess to her how truly in love with her he was.

But first, he needed to practice a couple of lines to himself in the mirror.

"I'll be right back, okay?" he told her, and she nodded.

He skipped off to the bathroom in the most emo-ly calm way that he could, thinking to himself how absolutely lucky he was to be dating such a gorgeous, smart, and wickedly funny person.

Swinging the bathroom door open, he went immediately to the sink, and washed out his mouth—eliminating any odors from their Korean dinner that night but also not making it _super_ obvious that he was cleaning up his breath for a kiss—and brushed his side-swept raven black hair over his head to make sure that he was as imperfectly close to perfect as he could be.

He studied himself for a moment—making sure his snake bite piercings were still intact—and hopped up and down a couple times, shaking out the nervous energy from his body.

Alright—he was going to ask Mavis Vermillion to be his girlfriend.

Zeref half-jogged half-casually walked back to his dorm room and knocked on his door before walking in with as much suave badassness as he could possibly fit in the couple of steps into the room.

What he saw though, was nothing that even another quick extra minute in the bathroom could prepare him for.

Mavis was blanched; her face pale and white. She quite literally looked like she had just seen a ghost.

"H-Hey Z-Zeref?" she asked, slowly looking up with him.

"Yeah?" And then he took one look at her—frightened face, wide eyes, and the thick black book open to a center page in her shaking hands—and blinked.

Fuck.

She had discovered his logbook of death.

"Oh," he simply said, his black eyes hardening. He swallowed a hard lump in his throat.

He guessed he had a lot of explaining to do.

"What's….this?" she continued, her voice trembling. She looked back at the page hesitantly, but only for a second—she kept her terrified emerald green eyes on him.

She pointed a dainty finger on a column.

"Entrapment in a 50-gallon empty fish tank…death by slow and steady suffocation after loss of consciousness," she read slowly, moving onto the next line. "Consumption of over 50 liters of carrot juice over the course of 10 days…death by liver intoxication due to overdose of Vitamin A…." and she moved onto the next line. "Neck snapped under heavy window…death by severing of spinal cord…"

"W-Why are there just…. _pages_ of ways to…. _kill_ people?" Her eyes moved back to his. "And why are there _checkmarks_?"

Zeref looked at her for a long minute.

There was really no way around this.

"I have a confession to make, Mavis," he said.

And unfortunately Zeref, this confession was nothing like the one he had been rehearsing for a good part of that day.

"Those ways to die…they aren't for other people," he explained, steadily. "I…I'm immortal."

He looked at her quickly to gauge how she was taking things.

Not well.

He continued, nevertheless. "But…in order to remain immortal, I have to find an ingenious and original way to kill myself every new moon…and I can't repeat methods because if I do, then I will be doomed for the rest of eternity."

She blinked, and he knew that she was nowhere near believing him.

"I, um, I'm…I'm sorry if this is all really sudden and new to you," he apologized, taking a step toward her.

She took a step back.

"I…I'm not going to hurt you," he said. "And if you want to….stop dating me, that's fine, too."

He took a step forward, but this time she was already up against a wall—and her eyes flashed terror when she realized that she had nowhere else to escape.

"I…" she started, while he prepared for the worst.

There was no way that the conversation was going to go well, no matter how he calculated the possibilities. If she had lost all trust of him and thought he was crazy, he would have completely lost his chances at telling her his true feelings about her.

If she was scared of him, he would never be able to see her again.

And worst of all, if she wanted to break up with him, he would have lost the love of his life without even ever held her hand.

Truly it was a lose-lose (more like, many-loss) situation for him—no matter how he saw it.

"So…so you can't die?" she asked him.

At first, he was surprised that she had asked for more details—as if she was reading into the fine print of his contract—but he realized that her curiosity was probably just going to make it worse.

"No," he said. "I'm…just immortal."

"How?"

"I…." and he thought for a moment—because after 400 years, sometimes it was difficult to remember how he had been cursed with eternal life in the first place, _especially_ during finals week—before explaining, "…well back in the 15th century, I tried to…perform a rite where I tried to revive my…younger brother…"

He checked her reactions to his story. He couldn't tell if she actually wanted to hear more of this or not, but he just continued, regardless. There was nothing he could redeem himself with now, though.

"And…I revived him—actually Natsu is a freshman at Fairy Tail University right now," he added, as an aside. "But anyway…in return for Natsu's revival, I had to remain immortal and continually kill myself on every new moon…and…that's why…you're looking at my death logbook right now…"

She blinked again, and his heart sank.

"Is that true?" she asked him, closing the book slowly and placing it back on his desk.

And to be honest, he was surprised that she was still even talking to him.

"Yeah…" he said, looking to the side and putting his hands in the pockets of his black jeans. "I…I was going to tell you…at some point," he trailed off. "After…I told you that I loved you."

Wait. _Why_ the fuck did he just spill _all_ his beans?

What the hell was he thinking?

But then, to his complete and utter surprise, she stepped forward and suddenly hugged him, wrapping her arms completely around him—embrace completely unexpected.

"What…" he asked, but she quickly interrupted him.

"You're such a loving and caring brother!" she exclaimed.

And now, it was _his_ turn for his eyes to widen and his onyx eyes to become terrified.

"Wait—" And as much as he was completely overjoyed that she had literally placed himself in his arms _after_ he had told her all those gruesome things and it was the first time that he had actually physically touched her, he pushed her away from him and stepped back three.

"I just told you that I'm immortal!" he exclaimed. "And that I kill myself practically every month as a side effect of a revival of the dead rite—why are you not running away from me right now?!"

"You can't believe how happy I am to hear that!" she exclaimed.

He wasn't sure if his heart rate was raised because he was _very_ terrified of the fact that she was _happy_ to hear that…or if he was _very_ elated that he, after all, may have been able to continuing _dating_ her.

"I was going to tell you later too," she confessed to him, pulling away from him and looking deep his eyes. "But I'm immortal too!"

His breath stopped.

"I'm actually a _ghost_ ," she told him, eyes sparkling brighter than he had ever seen before.

Suddenly her pale skin, white-blond hair, and colder-than-normal embrace started falling into place.

And now, _his_ eyes widened.

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 **Teehee.**

 **...okay, I'm starting to have too many Zervis stories now, haha. I should probably bunch all these Zervis one-shots together into a series...**

 **thir13enth**


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